An Affordable Gaming PC For Beginners

The Rhodium 950 X8 Gaming Desktop By CybertronPC

Cybertron is a smaller computer manufacture that has built a name for itself offering gaming capable PC's out-of-box at a reasonable price point. With different models ranging from the entry level Electrum series up to the premium Titanium series, they offer something for just about everyone. Now you're not going to get the power of a custom build running multiple GTX 1080 TI GPU's with custom cooling and processing (which you can build on their website), but you will be able to call yourself a PC gamer.

The Rhodium Series, which is a step above the entry-level Electrium series, will play most games while staying below the $1000 price point. Now again, it's not going to give you 400+ average frame rates or 4k video performance but you can run about any game. So let's take a look at exactly what this stock PC is packing under the hood.

Processor

The Rhodium 950 X8 comes equipped with a respectable AMD FX-8300, 8core 3.30GHz processor whic uses 32nm Piledriver architecture. It is considered a performance processor and is given a 9/10 by Game-Debate and a 9.6 by their users. The cool part about the FX-8300 is it's easily overclocked and can get up to 4.2GHz.

All and all, for a PC at this price point, the FX-8300, though not the best money can buy, is certainly plenty of bang for the back and will provide plenty of performance for all but the most critical of PC Gamers.

GPU

The GPU on the Rhodium series is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 (2GB GDDR5. Although not as high on the performance chart as the AMD Processor it's paired with, the GTX 1050 will provide plenty of power. The GTX 1050 boasts the following specs:

CUDA Cores: 640

Core Speed: 1354MHz

Boost Clock: 1455MHz

Memory Speed: 7Gbps

The GTX 1050 also supports a wide range of resolutions, however, with anything 2560x1440 and over performance does tend to drop off. All in all, the 1050 will offer pretty reasonable performance on most games, clocking above-console framerates on most benchmark games (68fps on GTA V). Game-Debate gives it an 8/10 on their overall performance scale.

Other Key Components

RAM

The Rhodium 950 X8 ships with 2 PATRIOT 8GB DDR3 RAM already installed with two upgrade slots. PATRIOT has a pretty good rep for cranking out great RAM cards and are probably best known for their viper series. Although slightly behind with the DDR3, it is punching along at 1600MHz so it's not going to bog down the rig.

Storage

Standard issue for the Rhodium 950 X8 is a sizable 1TB Toshiba HDD with a Serial ATA-600 interface. There are certainly more roomy hard drives out there and an upgrade to an SSD/HDD combo wouldn't be a bad idea. Even stock though, the 1TB capacity should store more than enough games to keep you occupied at any given time without having to make room every week.

Motherboard

The Rhodium is built on a Gigabyte AM3+ motherboard which leaves a little room to upgrade which is always nice. It already has support built in for and AMD upgrade and provides support for the standard NVIDIA chip sets. All and all it's a pretty sturdy platform and provides plenty of room to grow in the future.

PSU & Chassis

The PSU for the Rhodium series is CybertronPC's home brew powersource; the CybertronPC 500W ATX12V. Unfortunately, CybertronPC doesn't give a whole lot of info on the PSU, other than it pushes out about 500w with intergrated cooling, not much more is known. The Chasis on the other hand provides a pretty cool open-side look along with LED lighting and comes in blue, black and white with different accent kits available. The chasis also offers a good amount of room and airflow to keep the rig running cool for those late night benders.

Final Consensus

All and all, CybertronPC's Rhodium 950 X8 is the perfect gaming PC for younger gamers or older gamers just testing the waters. It's a great option if you don't want to pour tons of time and money into customizing and researching a custom build. The Rhodium 950 X8 brings enough power to run today's more demanding games at a respectable pace and gives plenty of room for upgrades all at an affordable price point.

Gaming since '95, began InfoGamer in June of 2017 to bring a new twist to gaming media and reporting. Brandon contributes the weekly Out Of Box hardware review as well as other articles for InfoGamer. Follow Brandon on Twitter or Google+ for more!